"In all the characters I've played, there's been this restraint, this refusal to let her hair down. Playing Katharine was so liberating -- it was a great relief not to have to stand there and twitch in the background."

"Kristin's beauty comes from how she carries herself," says the film's director, Anthony Minghella. "When you're looking down a lens at her, her face constantly changes depending on the angle she presents to you."

Passion Player
by Josh Rottenberg

For Kristin Scott Thomas, ten weeks of working in the scorching Sahara is not enough, while ten minutes in a Hollywood casting director's air-conditioned office is too much. She's funny that way. "Have you ever been to the proper desert?" the actress asks over breakfast one late-summer morning in New York. "The most extraordinary thing is the silence. There's nothing to move out there. I got such a buzz out of it."

Scott Thomas is certainly getting lots of buzz these days, but little of her precious silence. With her portrayal of the sultry, star-crossed Katharine Clifton in The English Patient, Scott Thomas's career is suddenly as hot as the sands of Tunisia at noon. The only silence is coming from those, including some of the film's investors, who doubted she could carry off such a star-caliber showcase role.

The role is indeed a departure for the actress, who is best known for playing frosty English sophisticates in such films as Bitter Moon, Angels & Insects, Mission: Impossible, and Four Weddings and a Funeral, in which her performances as the acerbic, smoldering Fiona made Andie MacDowell's sunny Carrie seem -- let's face it -- a bit drab. In The English Patient's Katharine, the actress's emotionality, held artfully in check in her portrayals of stoic, chain-smoking aristocrats, is finally given free, hot-blooded rein. "In all the characters I've played, there's been this restraint, this refusal to let her hair down," she says. "Playing Katharine was so liberating -- it was a great relief not to have to stand there and twitch in the background."

Scott Thomas lets her sensuous (but not natural) blond mane down in virtually every scene of The English Patient, including one bathtub glasses-fogger with costar Ralph Fiennes. "Kristin's beauty comes from how she carries herself," says the film's director, Anthony Minghella. "When you're looking down a lens at her, her face constantly changes depending on the angle she presents to you."

Chiseled cheekbones and beguiling eyes notwithstanding, it's that air of mystery that makes Scott Thomas so uniquely alluring. Beneath her cool self-assurance one can hear faint rumbles from deeper fault lines -- a quality Minghella says she shares with her costar. "Kristin and Ralph seem to be cut from the same cloth," he says. "All the time that they apparently exude confidence, there's also another note sounding, a note of frailty."

Whether calling MacDowell a slut in Four Weddings or spitting in Ian McKellen's face in Richard III, Scott Thomas has made modulating that other note her life's work. Director Roman Polanski remembers shooting the final moments of Bitter Moon, in which Scott Thomas's character, having gracefully endured a cruise rife with sexual and marital tension, finally lets her composure slip: "It was 5 in the morning, and we were all just beaten. We must have done fifteen to twenty takes, and in every take, when it was needed, tears would start gathering in Kristin's eyes and just fall on demand."

The eldest of five children, Scott Thomas lost her father, a Royal Navy pilot, in a plane accident at the age of five; years later, her stepfather died the same way. "I was happy, I wasn't beaten, and I lacked nothing," the actress says of her childhood. "But it wasn't what people expect -- it was very much sort of pinching and scraping. I don't know how my mother did it."

After hiding her interest in acting for years ("Acting is a noble art in England, but not in my family," she explains), Scott Thomas enrolled in drama school in London but found her teachers cold and unforgiving. At eighteen, having been told she'd never be an actress, Scott Thomas dropped out and retreated to Paris for what she thought would be a two-week vacation. "I was in a muddle," she remembers. "It was a relief to get to Paris and be nobody, just be a girl." She never returned, and still lives there with her husband, a French obstetrician, and their two children.

As with her native England, Scott Thomas has for years held Hollywood at arm's length (and vice versa -- in Mission: Impossible, her spy is bumped off in the first ten minutes). She made the rounds after Bitter Moon but found selling herself repugnant: "I'd just worked with one of the living legends of film, so I was a bit pleased with myself. And I'd get, 'Polanski -- he's the guy who did Tess, right?'" Though The English Patient may open some doors for Scott Thomas, for the time being she still seems content to peek through the keyhole. "When I get to Hollywood I feel all this pressure to be exactly the same as everybody else," she says with a sigh. "I think it's more interesting to dither around on the outskirts and just nip in from time to time."

[Frank W Ockenfels 3, the photographer assigned for this article who "has photographed some of Hollywood's most demanding stars", added, "'She's kind of non-Hollywood real, you know?' Ockenfels says of shooting the costar of The English Patient. 'She's not a star, she's an actor; what she brings to a shoot is not about glamour, it's about giving who she is.'"]